"5 COOL THINGS" - weekly emails

5 Cool Things 😎This week's items of interest

5 Cool Things:
04/04/19Hi, this is Greg Powell. I hope you'll enjoy one or more of these interesting topics from the world of business and beyond. Dan Powell, my son and collaborator, has researched the articles and written the summaries, so this is not a boilerplate message. We'd like to give you a weekly break to learn about something cool or, better yet, 5 Cool Things.

Trust in a Work Setting by Greg Powell

Trust is the foundation of any relationship, but there are particular needs and demands in a work setting that affect our level of trust for co-workers. Wouldn't it be helpful to have a straightforward way of gauging trust when hiring, managing, developing, or just getting along with others? This article offers just such a formula. Read more...

'Impossible' Meatless Patty Gets Burger King Whopper Test (Reuters)

“Meatless” meat has been a fringe product for some time now, promising to cut down on resources and carbon emissions used for food production, but so far lacking the sort of taste or texture quality that would lure meat-eaters. Now, an improved patty made by Impossible Foods is being put to the ultimate test in a new “Impossible Whopper” coming soon from fast-food icon Burger King. “We wanted to make sure we had something that lived up to the expectations of the Whopper,’ said Burger King’s North America president, Christopher Finazzo. ‘We’ve done sort of a blind taste test with our franchisees, with people in the office, with my partners on the executive team, and virtually nobody can tell the difference.’” Read more…

The increasingly-interconnected global economy is resulting in all sorts of weird resource flows these days. But perhaps one of the weirdest is the notion that the Saudi Arabian government would import thousands of tons of crops grown with California water — California, of course, being no stranger to drought crises of its own. While the farmers say that exporters pay well and stimulate the local economy, the relationship takes advantage of the fact that “in the US we are still governing our water based on compacts made in the 1800s – before the western cities had boomed, before suburban sprawl, before factory farming and a global supply chain and, of course, before climate change.” Read more…

The Day the Dinosaurs Died (The New Yorker)

Roughly 66 million years ago, an asteroid at least six miles wide slammed into the Earth near the present-day Yucatan peninsula. The impact, which resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs, changed the Earth’s environment so drastically that it’s been a source of fascination for generations of scientists. But interestingly, fossil evidence from the “KT boundary,” the geological record of the impact found across the world, has been scarce. That may be about to change, with paleontologist Robert DePalma’s 2012 excavation of a formation in North Dakota called Hell Creek, which revealed remnants of material that rained down from the asteroid impact’s enormous debris plume. “When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” Read more…

Are We Living in a Golden Age of '90s Period Films? (Esquire)

“Cultural nostalgia seems to travel in roughly 20-year cycles.” At least, that’s the theory behind the recent surge of media set in the 1990’s. While 30-something screenwriters might just be nostalgic for the stuff of their childhoods like mixtapes, flannel shirts, grunge music, and a world before smartphones, there’s another, more subtle reason for decade-based nostalgia — it places the characters into a simpler, more innocent time, removed from the pressing social problems of the modern world. Maybe that’s why filmmakers in the 90s mined the 1970s for movies like Casino and Dazed and Confused, and why 80s nostalgia hit a peak in the 2000s with Donnie Darko and the surprise resurgence of Journey’s arena-rock anthem Don’t Stop Believing. Read more…